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Sunday, January 20, 2008

Week 4 Thing 8 - RSS Feeds and Google Reader

I started using RSS feeds after our conference in November. I determined that I would go home and immediately try some of the things I learned in workshops before I got distracted by other responsibilities. I chose to start with what I learned about RSS feeds from the workshop by Chris Harris. Mr. Harris is always a pleasure to listen to and I always feel I get more ideas to ponder per minute than I have any right to expect. His combination of humor and thoughtfulness make him my speaker of choice every time.

I already had i-google on my computer, but was far from utilizing it's capabilities. Adding Google Reader was really productive. It's taken me a while to find the balance between adding anything and being rather spartan about additions. At first I added a large number of professional feeds and then got caught up in feeds for my other interests. Before long I realized that much of my "hobby" related feeds were really not something I was going to be interested in. As I dropped those things started to become more managable.

RSS certainly saves time by bringing the information to me. There is no doubt in my mind that RSS provides me with more pertinent information than I would be able to absorb by searching myself. The fact is that I often will look at an article because it is right in front of my nose and it looks enticing. I hadn't planned on reading articles, catching up or looking for information, but if it is front and center it gets my attention. That, I think, is the beauty of RSS. Bringing information to the reader without effort, without time outlay and making it easier to keep up to date without much outlay of time or effort.

2 comments:

Jean Macpherson said...
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LibraryStrong said...

I also started out adding feeds from various professional sites and quickly realized that I couldn't read all of it so I deleted and started again. Now I'm being careful about only adding what I want. I added all the people in this class so I could easily see when someone posted something new.